After an inspection of the mill, the same as found on many farms, I visited the mowers. They were at work with vigor, swinging the scythe with a powerful stroke. This a mower does for about an hour when he suddenly drops it in the swath, goes to the house for a bowl of _Skyr_, curds, a cup of coffee or lounges on the ground to smoke or take snuff with a companion in a similar degree of exhaustion. After an hour of rest he returns to his scythe and thus from early morning till midnight does he labor during the haying season. There are always some men and a few women mowing but one can usually find two or three scythes deserted by their users in the swath. I had an introduction to the crooked, hand-blistering, ache-producing instrument of America in my tender years which ripened into an acquaintance of great familiarity, which, true to the proverb, bred contempt. I examined this Icelandic turf-parer not without misgivings as to what I could do with so strange an implement. The scythe is twenty inches long, straight and two and a half inches wide. The blade is extremely thin and buckles and bends in contact with the turf. The snath is the peculiar feature. It is made like a rake handle and is six feet long, perfectly straight and attached to the scythe at right angles. The nebs are unlike; that for the right hand is like ours and similarly placed, that for the left is a straight strip about eighteen inches long and is placed on the snath at right angles and just below the shoulder, reaching down to the palm of the left hand. At the end of this strip is a cross piece to fit the palm much like the end of a canoe paddle. The end of the long snath protrudes over the left shoulder.